


Aren't You Always Wanting Answers

by NothingRiddikulus



Category: Carry On Series - Rainbow Rowell
Genre: Gen, Platonic Cuddling, also if u helped me talk thru this (u know who u are) Thanks :'), also this is technically canon compliant but also not rlly, autistic!simon snow, basically pre at least most of carry on but theyre still sort of carry on era penny and simon, bc if simon knew he was autistic i assume it wld have come up lol, but also platonic actively Not cudling bc ur bro is touch averse after meltdowns, i have no idea when this is set like ig late seventh year early eighth, if that makes sense, please go easy on me i havent written fic in ages
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:54:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23814151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NothingRiddikulus/pseuds/NothingRiddikulus
Summary: It’s one of those days where watching Baz pace in our room is making me dizzy, and when I leave to find some peace it’s noisy everywhere in Watford School.Sometimes, when I feel like this, I worry I’m going to go off.Simon has a meltdown, and Penny gently submits a theory to him. He's not sure about what it would mean to be autistic yet, but if Penny says it's ok, he trusts her.
Relationships: Penelope Bunce & Simon Snow
Comments: 13
Kudos: 40





	Aren't You Always Wanting Answers

It’s one of those days where watching Baz pace in our room is making me dizzy, and when I leave to find some peace it’s noisy everywhere in Watford School. Most weekends everyone trails off to some nearby shopping centres, or mucks around the school grounds, but if it’s raining you end up with every teen mage in the country going off the walls inside. It’s right rowdy. I wander Watford’s winding passages like I’m in first year, hoping to find a nook or an attic that no one has made their own secret yet, so I can worm into it and nest there like a wood eating bug. In those days even the good bits about Watford, which was most of it _and still is_ , made me sniffle and hide sometimes. I was afraid it would all get taken away from me, that they’d realise I was an imposter and not magickal at all. Everyone else in my year knew so much more about the world of mages than I did.

I end up in the dining hall just before afternoon tea, so I sit myself down and decide I might as well wait it out. People file in soon after, and then the dining hall is the loudest place to be. Girls are singing a song they heard over summer that’s been trendy. Fourth years who don’t know better are shouting the emphasis in their spells. And people talk normally, too. Often this chatter is exactly what I need, just to be around magic and feel at home in it, but right now I have something like a headache and it’s sucking all the fun out of eating scones.

I think about casting a **speak of the devil** on Penny, because I can’t see her in the crowd and that always makes me antsy, but I’m not sure how to do that one, and there’s a twist. It’s either you have to really hate the person you’re after, or that someone has to have actually brought them up in conversation before you speak the spell. Either way I’m not risking a teleportation. Not at the best of times and definitely not now. My foot is tapping faster by the second.

It’s bad enough when I’m at one of the homes over summer, and the other boys are talking late at night in their booming voices and I’m stuck in a room with eight of them. But here at Watford, words carry too much power. Harmless chatter has this way of sort of fizzing in the air and staying there. And the old walls echo. Getting hit with sound feels offensive and when I can’t find a place to hide from it I want to lash out. Defend myself. My magic bubbles close to my skin but so does everyone else’s, or at least it seems to when I’m this sensitive to the smell and of it.

Sometimes, when I feel like this, I worry I’m going to go off.

I don’t go off. I sob until my throat feels sore, outside in the rain. I hate this the most. When there’s smoke coming out my ears at least it’s useful. (Sometimes) When I’m beating trees with my sword to let off steam at least it makes _sense_ , even if it’s the behaviour of _stupid_ people who have had _almost twenty years to think of a better way to express emotions_ (Baz’s words). But the uncontrollable sobbing and howling is just naff. I wouldn’t do it if I could help it. I used to think everyone else was just better at hiding it, or forcing it down, since everyone else is better than me at pretty much everything but _especially_ anything self control. But most people don’t cry like this, if you can call it crying. It’s like the emotional version of wetting yourself, what I do. Chosen ones don’t do that. When Penny cries it’s sniffy and the crying dribbles under her chin. And it takes more than scraping cutlery.

At some point I stop making noise. Time goes slack and my brain can’t start moving, like the needle’s gotten stuck on the record somehow. When Penny finds me half an hour later I’m curled in a tight, cold ball on the patio, with my blazer stuck in damp creases against my back. She casts **under my umbrella** and the slow drizzle of rain that’s still falling stops and slumps sideways when it hits a point about a metre over my head.

Penny squats down next to me, and smooths her skirt over her knees. She doesn’t try to touch me, but I feel her lay her cloak over my shoulders. And I can feel her eyes on me, just because she’s close. It still puts me on the defensive, but I’d rather Penny was here.

She doesn’t try to talk to me either. At least not to ask me questions. False alarms aren’t uncommon – the times I almost go off but scream with my head in my hands instead – and we may not understand them fully but Penny’s seen enough of them by now to know how it goes. She knows I get near catatonic afterwards, like something’s gone out of me. I always get it back, but I always sit with my eyes closed while it passes worried that this will be the time I don’t.

‘Simon, do you want to come back to your room?’

I shake my head between my legs. But Penny gets that I mean ‘can’t’ not ‘won’t’, and she casts **it’s not rocket science**. Immediately the thought of uncoiling myself feels bearable and I can take steps with her if she guides me. She takes us a route that’s a bit out of the way, judging from the carpets.

(My brain is pretty muddled still, but two spells so close together is definitely a waste of magic. Just now I’m too tired to be patronised. I feel cared for. I think after all this time if I had to say what love felt like it might be Penny’s magic.)

Back in my room, we lie on my bed on our backs. Baz is at his violin lesson this evening, and will probably be out sucking up rats in the catacombs afterwards, so Penny can stay with me as long as I need. And I don’t have to worry about Baz finding another weakness of mine to add to the list he must have by now. He’s probably typed it up. Or handwritten it, in finest Pitch ink, on monogrammed paper, with all my flaws and sore points categorised and now including ‘ _Scared of noises. Cries like someone run over his cat and gets even more tongue tied than normal. Objectively pathetic. Must have something mentally wrong with him._ ’

I turn over and cram my head against Penny’s shoulder. I changed into my pyjamas when we got in and she’s pulled her soggy jumper off, and is wearing one of my hoodies instead. She folds an arm absentmindedly round me, hinging it at the elbow rather than the shoulder. She’s thinking about something else.

‘…Simon?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Do you think you might be autistic?’

I blink, and think about pulling away from her, but I stand my ground instead. My face is red hot.

‘I… what?’ My voice comes out thin and there’s a pit in my stomach though I don’t know why. It’s not shame exactly. No one really tells me how to think about these kind of things, apart from Penny herself when it comes up and so far this hasn’t. Or if I know someone, and I don’t know anyone autistic. I know Rhys, and he has a wheelchair, but it’s not like we’ve chatted about it. I don’t know if we’re that close. And I don’t know if autistic is the same kind of thing or not.

‘I did a lot of research over summer’, Penny tells me, and she sounds confident. She gives me a tone setting smile, which I only half see from where my face is her armpit.

‘I’m not socially awkward.’

‘We’ve known each other almost ten years and I don’t think you’ve made full eye contact once. You say yourself you never know how to phrase things. And let’s be real Simon, you’re friendly with everyone, but you don’t actually have that many friends.’ She winces. ‘I don’t mean that badly.’

‘But it _is_ bad, isn’t it?’

‘No, Simon, it’s answers. Aren’t you always wanting those? It explains your problems with spoken communication. And why you’re just a bit strange. And, yeah, I know those aren’t up there with where the mage goes and whether Baz drinks blood but it’s something. I’m _sure_ it could help us understand how you use magic better.’

I frown, and I want to counter that we don’t even know if she’s right yet. But Penny is usually right. It just worries me something chronic to know she’s probably right about a thing when I don’t fully know what it means yet.

It reminds me of third year when the merwolves had us surrounded in a strange part of the lake where the water was bright teal, and Penny and I were struggling to breathe, close to drowning, until she sent me a psychic message with the last of her energy to just follow her lead, and then opened her mouth and let the water enter her lungs. The merwolves swarmed her like they knew the triumphant look on her face as well as I did, and were angry she’d got one over them, but I had no idea what it was she had and I couldn’t see her. I had to just open my mouth like her even though I thought it would kill me. Because I trusted her. And it turned out _mammalian lungs acclimatise quickly to the mutated anaerobic bacteria in the lake_ if you give them a chance, and that’s how the merwolves breathed even though their top halves were wolf and didn’t have lungs, but I only got to have Penny explain that to me _after_ I’d opened my mouth underwater on her advice. And I still don’t understand what it means. Hearing this is like that psychic message.

That said, everything Penny’s mentioned so far strikes a chord. I am… strange. Beyond the whole chosen one thing, and no one knowing where I came from. I get all screwed up in the head and the gut really suddenly every now and then because I just don’t feel like I’m like other people. It’s tricky to put into words. But during the summer I think it comes from being the only mage, and when I’m at Watford I think it comes from being the only Chosen one. You don’t _expect_ to feel like other people. But it’s still upsetting, and I do start to agree with Penny more the longer I think about it.

It feels like it makes sense, basically. After all, I was just thinking about how there’s something mentally wrong with me. Or how Baz would say there is. I guess I’d have to say mentally different. Neurologically disabled? Something. A thought does occur to me though.

‘If I do so much autistic stuff how come no one ever noticed until now?’

‘Well. You’ve never stayed in the same care home for long. Not enough time to be noticed. And Normals are bad enough at that stuff. At Watford it’s worse. Mages can be _appallingly_ narrow minded. They only learned the meaning of the word ‘diversity’ ten years ago. Not exactly enough time to move on to recognising and accommodating neurodivergence.’

‘Right’. I swallow. Neurodivergence it is then. Words have an anxiety inducing amount of power even when they’re not magickal. This one is explosive. It feels like I’m being told about magic and mages again, and handed a whole new set of words to keep secret.

‘Do you think I have to tell Agatha?’ Or the Mage?’

‘Only if you want to.’ Penny rolls her eyes. ‘You don’t _have_ to do anything, Simon. It’s just something to think about. I have information I printed out off the internet for you. You can look through that and think about it, ok? And it’s only anyone’s business if you want it to be.’

I shrug, but it’s nice to hear. I never got any time to get used to the mage thing before everyone else knew about me. And even if nothing comes of this, I guess I’m happy I was told. It would have been a bit shit not to know.

‘You’re good, Simon’, says Penny. ‘You’re really good.’

I squeeze her hand.


End file.
